‘My Eyes Were So Puffy I Couldn’t Even Unseal Them’

Onemanda Preisinger is nervous about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday party. It’s not due to the usual causes associated with a home packed of loud preteen children, but because it’s the first time she will showcase her new face to acquaintances and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to inform all guests as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not how I look,’” states the 30-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.

How she looks is, well, a little surprising – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – look is the result of six aesthetic surgeries, such as an endoscopic mid-facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My spouse became emotional when he viewed me for the first time because I wasn’t able to even unseal my eyes. That’s how swollen I was,” she tells me via video call from her house. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m fine, I’m not hurting. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”

Growing Trend of Youthful Facial Lifts

According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is one of a rising count of individuals electing to undergo a facelift in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a ten years prior to typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of forty to sixty. (Though many specialists are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We treat genetics, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facial lifts,” states based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the head and neck. “It’s a very significant procedure, and I’m a bit concerned when I see people opting for it as a personal preference.”

Understanding the Facelift Procedure

A facelift, also known as a rhytidectomy, lifts the ligaments in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Our faces are built a bit like layers of an onion,” says based in Kent facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the surface, then a layer of supportive tissue called the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Consider the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what ages us; that is what loosens and sags and drags the skin downward with it.”

You endanger operating on people that have deeper issues. It’s not a practice for an ethical plastic surgeon to pursue

Once the preserve of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of dermal fillers stretches the face and causes laxity in the skin – combined with the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, cut-price medical tourism, and the development of new, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are driving a new kind of patient towards this invasive surgery. Statistics indicate an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the last year in the United Kingdom; while a study revealed that the percentage of youthful candidates is growing, with one-third of procedures now performed on patients aged 35-55.

“Patients are asking now to look like the optimal form of themselves and obviously the techniques are evolving,” comments Orfaniotis. Currently, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a technique evangelised by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.

Deep Plane Technique

Where a more traditional rhytidectomy involves lifting the SMAS, the deep plane facelift releases the underlying structures underneath, enabling surgeons to restructure the face by moving the underlying layers, and avoiding the tight, stretched appearance sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We’re not putting stress on the dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” says prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The dermis comes with it as a passenger.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a unified block results in a more natural-looking and more durable result. It additionally implies that the surgery is not just being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive many inquiries from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” says Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had never planned on getting a facelift – at least not at the age of 30. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an attempt at “symmetry correction” implied that by the time she entered her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I desired to appear youthful,” she clarifies. “I underwent it because the filler ruined my face. I wish I had never using it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t believe I would be where I’m at currently.”

If injectable substances ever fully dissolve has long been a point of contention in the cosmetic field. “Research have shown that they seldom completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they move and can obstruct lymphatic channels. One of the contributors to what we term ‘pillow face’ is additionally the fact that in a sense, the face gets slightly fluid-filled because its ability to drain lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Though research into the area is preliminary, cautionary statements on injectables’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been released, and further research initiated. One highly regarded face specialist, speaking on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would avoid using injectables in a client because of the dangers they pose. “A lot of doctors don’t want to talk about this, because the manufacturers who make injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he says, of plastic surgeons facing court orders after raising their concerns.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she felt as if she had to keep replenishing it – especially as it started to migrate to different areas of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a nearby cosmetic doctor in Florida suggested that a facial and neck surgery might be what she required to exit the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she found herself selecting from a list of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, sent to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.

Initially, Preisinger had planned for an eyelid surgery – commonly called eyelid surgery – but her doctor advised her that a facial lift was the correct option for the laxity she was experiencing in her face. She booked a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The eve of her surgery, one day after she’d arrived alone in Turkey, she opted to include a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We’re going to elevate the under-eye bags.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we remove some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more surgeries,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day surgery, plus a three-day|